Masters of FUD

Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. As a form of preemptive marketing, IBM invented it. Microsoft perfected it. Every company with a technological edge employs it. When technologies are new, complex, and not widely understood, you can easily engender a bit of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) in your customers, making them wary of the claims and products of your competitors. Often you don't even have to introduce a new product; all you have to do is intimate that you have something better in the works or publish some research that impugns a competitor's research.

Intel does its own brand of FUDmongering. At this year's Intel Developer Forum, Louis Burns, Intel's new general manager, declared that AMD's HyperTransport Technology was inadequate and wouldn't scale ten years into the future. This may not sound like a big deal; companies regularly disparage one another's technologies. But considering that more than 100 companies have signed on for AMD's design and that the technology is due to go into production later this year, I'd say Intel has dropped a Brinks truck onto the table rather than merely upping the ante.

HyperTransport, formerly code-named LDT (Lightning Data Transport), is AMD's replacement for the PCI bustoday's major interconnect between a processor and high-speed peripherals. At a theoretical top speed of 132 MBps, PCI is fast, but not fast enough to keep up with multigigahertz processors, gigabit Ethernet, and video cards that can render HDTV images in real time. HyperTransport has enough speed for multiprocessor and shared-memory architecturesan important goal for AMD, which has traditionally been limited to single-processor architectures.

AMD strikes again. There's something thrilling about reading HyperTransport's specs and delving into the architecture. HyperTransport can be implemented with as few as 2 pins or as many as 32, and it has a top speed of 3.2 gigabytes per second in each direction over the full 32-bit bus. Potentially it can simplify the design of today's PCs radically, eliminating the need for separate PCI, AGP, and memory buses, and providing a high-speed path for fast external interconnects, such as USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394. Devices with fewer pins can interchange data with the system's full-width bus by negotiating compatibility.

The technology can also be implemented as a backplane bus between servers. The data moving over the bus is packetized, and the design gives priority to isochronous streams, such as video and audio. The design also supports Microsoft's Plug and Play architecture. On the business side, use of the design is royalty-free and does not require any cross licensing or technology exchange.

AMD's first public discussion of HyperTransport was at the 1999 Microprocessor Forum. Over the next year and a half, AMD gathered industry support, which then culminated in the announcement of 100 supporting companies. A few weeks after AMD's formal rollout, Intel fired the FUD guns, saying that an interconnect bus that would last for ten years would need to run at up to 10 gigabits per second per pinnot 800 megabits. Intel claims that it will introduce a counterspec at this fall's IDF, which is about the time that HyperTransport-based devices are expected to begin shipping.

Will the strategy scare off the system designers? Some, perhaps. But Intel can ill afford to be shamed by AMD yet again over bus speeds. Intel set the standard for motherboard frontside bus speed (FSB)at 66 MHzmany moons ago and remained there, complacently, as CPU speeds crept into the midhundreds of megahertz. AMD demonstrated significantly enhanced throughput with 75- and 100-MHz FSBs. Intel then had to match and raise the ante before it died of embarrassment. Intel has been similarly humbled by the AMD Athlon and Duron outperforming equivalent Pentium 4 and Celeron chips. Intel seems to have tacked off into an "ours has a faster clock rate" approach instead of "ours is a faster chip."

I doubt Intel's FUD foray seriously damaged HyperTransport; the technology is too far along. I look forward, though, to Intel's counterproposal. It should be really goodten years from now.

Bill Machrone is vice president of technology at Ziff Davis Publishing and editorial director of the Interactive Media and Development Group. He joined Ziff Davis in May 1983 as technical editor of PC Magazine, became editor-in-chief in September of that year, and held that position for the next eight years, while adding the titles of publisher and publishing director. During his tenure, Machrone created the tough, labs-based comparison reviews that propelled PC Magazine to the forefront of the industry and made it the seventh-largest magazine...
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